At the age of 26 I am, by dint of millennial law, an app-happy perma-swiper, dishing out personal data with reckless abandon. It’s not that I want to grant access to my information willy nilly – in fact, I am near-chronically clandestine when it comes to posting details of my personal life online – but that, in the age of the sharing economy, I have come to accept that private details constitute currency for the ‘free’ services that dominate our lives.

It was – of course it was! – a personality quiz shared on Facebook that this week reignited the debate about just what and where the information we share about ourselves actually ends up. App This Is Your Digital Life invited Facebook users to...